Making Movable Type Jump Through Hoops

CustomFields 2.1b4

An unfortunately boring title for what is a fantastic release of CustomFields. This second public beta of CustomFields brings a horde of new features (and, thanks to all the beta tests, even more bug fixes!). Here's rundown for what's new:

Data storage in custom tables - ever since the beginning, CustomFields has taken to storing the data you enter in the general purpose mt_plugindata table. Although this was easy for me, the developer, storing the data in mt_plugindata had more cons than pros (for example, reading data from mt_plugindata is extremely slow). So, with this release of CustomFields, you can now specify where you would like your data to be stored.

The beauty of CustomFields' approach is that you do not have to touch your database at all! Continue adding/editing your fields through CustomFields' interface and the plugin will take care of creating and updating the necessary tables. It's so easy that it has become a recommended step during installation!

Dynamic Publishing is now fully supported. All the template tagsCustomFields provides (including the custom template tags you create for your fields) are all available in dynamic publishing.

Reorder Fields - in the previous beta, the order fields were displayed was extremely confusing (it wasn't alphabetically, was it the order they were created?) Thankfully this situation has been remedied with v2.1b4. A neat new sidebar widget appears on any screens which display custom fields and through a great drag and drop interface (a la Widget Sets), you can define the exact order you want your fields to appear.

3 Comments

Custom Fields is generally working great for me. I continue to have a problem with checkboxes, though -- I can't uncheck them once they've been checked. The fields aren't required, either, although at one point I did have them as a required, which makes me wonder if there's some cruft in my database.

This seems related to issue [543], but I've seen no improvement after merging in the fix outlined in 543. Any thoughts?

By comparing files, it seems CustomFields 2.1b4 includes until Changeset 525. Therefore, probably we should apply the 16 Changesets between 526 and 551 that relate to CustomFields (526-532, 535-536, 539-540, 542-544, 546, 551), in order to update it to some kind of experimental, unreleased 2.1b5.